Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal 1 | 2020 Conjunctions of the Literary and the Philosophical in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Writing The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women and Men Richard Anker Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/15576 DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.15576 ISSN: 1765-2766 Publisher AFEA Electronic reference Richard Anker, “The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women and Men”, Transatlantica [Online], 1 | 2020, Online since 01 December 2020, connection on 29 April 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/15576 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ transatlantica.15576 This text was automatically generated on 29 April 2021. Transatlantica – Revue d'études américaines est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women a... 1 The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women and Men Richard Anker What we are lacking is to dare to conceive that existence isn’t in its truth unless, between the two limits of an absolute finitude—birth and death—it devotes itself to the uncovering and the expression of the idealities, that is, the unreal formalities where how the real is what it is comes to appearance. Painting, but also music, and eminently poetry, are modes of achieving this task, where the aforementioned formalities are themselves enclosed in the movement of the materials of Art. Art is mute philosophy. Gérard Granel (2009 86, my translation) What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural? […] There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself. […] The pastoral problematic […] turns out to be the problematic of Being itself. Paul de Man (1983 239-240) 1 It may on first sight appear disingenuous to associate the word “pastoral” with the work of Joseph McElroy, a postmodern American author whose writings are renowned for their affiliations with technology and science. Nothing could be further from McElroy’s sensibility than the flight from urban complexity and the naïve idyllicism that is often associated with the pastoral ideal, notably in its folkloric and consumerist Transatlantica, 1 | 2020 The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women a... 2 images. Leo Marx, in his landmark The Machine in the Garden (1964), these days read primarily as a proto-ecocritical text, already argued however that the pastoral tradition in American literature begins not with a sense of harmony with nature, but rather with a sudden consciousness of the machine in nature’s midst, and not with the shepherd’s possession of an Arcadian realm but with the latter’s felt dispossession of it. Marx posits two kinds of pastoralism, a simple and a complex, the first escapist in its idealisation of the simple life in a green pasture, the second creative and properly literary in its awareness of technology as a “counterforce” to the idyllic vision (Marx 25). A “root conflict” between the machine and the garden, technology and nature, underwrites in Marx’s view the creative efforts of writers as diverse as Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Twain, Henry Adams and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And the shepherd, often of course a poet (or writer) in disguise, does not, at least in America, herd sheep, but stands out, Marx insists, as a mediating figure who “seeks a resolution of the conflict between the opposed worlds of nature and art” (22). Rather than harmony, it is ultimately a sense of awe, terror, and powerlessness (a theme I shall return to) that these writers display as witnesses of a “tragic doubleness” at the heart of the human condition (349). 2 McElroy’s well-documented but perhaps less well-understood optimism with respect to technology appears to set him in stark opposition to Henry Adams, the penultimate witness, in Marx’s book, of this “tragic doubleness.” McElroy distinguishes his work from what he calls the “pessimistic tradition” that he sees taking hold in Adams and gaining ascendency in the work of contemporaries he admires like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover (1987b 150-51). The connection he establishes, however, both in interviews and in the body of the novel itself, between James Mayn, doubtless the main character of Women and Men, and the author of The Education of Henry Adams (1987b 153; 1987a 636, 653, 962) points to an identity of interests, if not to a shared ideological vantage, between the two authors: one, the modernist visionary of the Dynamo and the Virgin as an all-embracing conflict between technological power and sublimated sexual vitality, and the other the postmodern novelist of considerably less fatalistic views concerning what Adams sees as a Manichean clash between two modes of production. Joseph Tabbi has pointed out that what postmodern authors like Gaddis, Pynchon, McElroy and DeLillo have in common with Adams is a “self- consciousness” that is “deeply rooted in the materiality of contemporary forms of production” (Tabbi 23), and this suggestion is valid and directly pertinent to my approach here. What distinguishes McElroy’s writing from that of Gaddis and Pynchon, however, derives from a fundamentally different conception of the materiality of production, determined by linguistic considerations proper to the work, but which are themselves conditioned by the author’s singular revision of the “root conflict” that Marx situates at the core of the American pastoral tradition. What I wish to suggest is that it is precisely the revision of this conflict, of “the great Art-Nature antithesis which philosophically is the basis of pastoral literature,” as Frank Kermode once put it (37), which enables Mayn to overcome his Adamsesque world-sickness and nostalgia, in Women and Men, and which, more generally, underwrites McElroy’s stance against the pessimistic tradition and the paranoid tendencies that Pynchon, for example, has inherited from Adams. 3 “The possible nightmare of being totally controlled by unseen agencies and powers is never far away in contemporary American literature,” Tony Tanner noted in his Transatlantica, 1 | 2020 The Pastoral Ethos of Joseph McElroy’s Writing: Lookout Cartridge and Women a... 3 introduction to City of Words (16). McElroy may well have been one of the authors Tanner had in mind when he penned his introductory remarks to his survey of American fiction of the ’60s and early ’70s, but the pastoral ethos that I shall argue is important to a full understanding of McElroy’s stance proceeds from an ability to resist this nightmare, not by a stoical streak merely, although an admirable steadfastness and an Emersonian (or simply Yankee) breed of optimism are distinguishing traits of the author, but by means of formal production. “What I am after,” McElroy writes in an essay describing his manner of composition, “is some sequence of contemplation that will use and transmute certain sources of our fears without merely rejecting them” (McElroy, 1974b).1 It is of course the formal means or the technical ability by which these fears are transmuted that place McElroy in a position to chastise, albeit in an affable manner, two divergent approaches he discerns among his contemporaries: on the one hand, writers whose parodic or satirical stance enables them to defend themselves inside their own fictional fabrications against the dread of System America, as he claims is the case with John Barth in his “pastoral parody” Giles Goat-Boy (1992 31); on the other, authors like Norman Mailer, himself parodied in Ancient History, for what McElroy sees as an outmoded heroic response to the threat of ego destruction that technology poses. Women and Men is inscribed in what McElroy calls a “total ecology” (1992) that can be understood neither as a fictional superstructure that defensively abstracts itself from its environment, à la Barth in McElroy’s view, nor as a negation of it in a would-be first step in its dialectical recovery, as in the heroic attitude of Mailer.2 The kind of stability or equilibrium, not to say resolution, that McElroy seeks in our postmodern phase of the great Art-Nature, or better, Technè-Phusis, conflict, resembles the surrealist approach to this antithesis more than it does perhaps that of his contemporaries, if one recalls surrealism’s probing of the limits between the inside and the outside of the work of art, and the fact that it sought to transform human society by liberating language from its utilitarian and instrumental functions. 4 It is difficult these days to discuss pastoralism without engaging the post-pastoral stance of contemporary ecocriticism, and this is all the truer here given McElroy’s own interests in environmentalist thinking. It is necessary therefore that I lay out a few basic principles pertaining to McElroy’s conception of the “total ecology” in which his work is inscribed, in order to distinguish it from certain premises that are commonly held, if not by any means universally adopted, in ecocritical writing.3 McElroy’s conception of a total ecology is one which includes what post-pastoral (and frequently anti-pastoral) ecocritics persist in calling “nature,” but does not, like many